From: Colossians 3:1-11
Seek the Things That Are Above
Avoid Sin
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Commentary:
1-4. The more ethical and exhortatory part of the letter begins at this point. It is
a practical application of the teaching given in the earlier chapters, designed to
suit the circumstances that have arisen in the Colossian church.
By His death and resurrection the Son of God frees us from the power of Satan
and of death. “By Baptism men are grafted into the paschal mystery of Christ;
they die with him, are buried with Him, and rise with Him” (Vatican II,
“Sacrosanctum Concilium”, 6). In other words, Christians have been raised to
a new kind of life, a supernatural life, whereby they share, even while on earth,
in the glorious life of the risen Jesus. This life is at present spiritual and hidden,
but when our Lord comes again in glory, it will become manifest and glorious.
Two practical consequences flow from this teaching—the need to seek the
“things that are above”, that is, the things of God; and the need to pass
unnoticed in one’s everyday work and ordinary life, yet to do everything with
a supernatural purpose in mind.
As regards the first of these the Second Vatican Council has said: “In their
pilgrimage to the Heavenly city Christians are to seek and relish the things
that are above (cf. Colossians 3:1-2): this involves not a lesser, but a greater
commitment to working with all men to build a world that is more human”
(”Gaudium Et Spes”, 57). Work, family relationships, social involvements—
every aspect of human affairs—should be approached in a spirit of faith and
done perfectly, out of love: “The true Christian, who acts according to this
faith”, Monsignor Escriva comments, “always has his sights set on God. His
outlook is supernatural. He works in this world of ours, which he loves
passionately; he is involved in all its challenges, but all the while his eyes
are fixed on Heaven” (”Friends of God”, 206).
Ordinary life, everyday interests, the desire to be better and to serve others
without seeking public recognition of one’s merits—all this makes for holiness
if done for love of God. A simple life “hid with Christ in God” (verse 3) is so
important that Jesus Himself chose to spend the greater part of His life on
earth living like an ordinary person: He was the son of a tradesman. “As we
meditate on these truths, we come to understand better the logic of God.
We come to realize that the supernatural value of our life does not depend
on accomplishing great undertakings suggested to us by our over-active
imagination. Rather it is to be found in the faithful acceptance of God’s will,
in welcoming generously the opportunities for small, daily sacrifice” ([St] J.
Escriva, “Christ Is Passing By”, 172).
This means that those who try to seek holiness by imitating Jesus in His
hidden life will be people full of hope; they will be optimistic and happy
people; and after their death they will share in the glory of the Lord: they
will hear Jesus’ praise, “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been
faithful over a little; I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your Master”
(Matthew 25:21).
On the value of the hidden life, see the note on Luke 2:15.
5-17. The Christian, who in Baptism has risen with Christ, should not live for
himself but for God. This means that every day he needs to put off his old
nature and put on the new.
The “old nature”, the “old man”: one who lets himself be led by disorderly
passions (cf. Rom 7:8), who lets his body do evil in the service of sin (v. 5;
cf. Rom 6:12f). With the help of grace the old nature is being more and more
broken down, while the new nature is constantly being renewed (cf. 2 Cor
6:16). Impurity and the other vices need to be uprooted so as to make room
for goodness and its train of Christian virtues (vv. 12-13), especially charity
(v. 14), which are features of the new nature.
Christ’s disciple, who has been made a new person and who lives for the Lord,
has a new and more perfect knowledge of God and of the world (v. 10). Thanks
to this he see things from a more elevated viewpoint; he has a “supernatural
insight”. This enables him to love and understand everyone without distinction
of race, nation or social status (v. 11), and to imitate Christ, who has given
himself up for all. “The Only-begotten of the Eternal Father vouchsafed to become
a son of man, that we might be made conformable to the image of the Son of God
and be renewed according to the likeness of him who created us. Therefore let all
those who glory in the name of Christians not only look upon our divine Savior as
the most sublime and most perfect model of all virtues, but also, by the careful
avoidance of sin and the unremitting practice of holiness, so reproduce in their
conduct his teaching and life, that when the Lord appears they may be like to him
in glory, seeing him as he is (cf. 1 Jn 3:2)” (Pius XII, “Mystici Corporis”, 20).
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.
From: Luke 6:20-26
The Beatitudes and the Curses
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Commentary:
20-49. These thirty verses of St. Luke correspond to some extent to the Sermon
on the Mount, an extensive account of which St. Matthew gives us in Chapters
5 to 7 in his Gospel. It is very likely that in the course of His public ministry in
different regions and towns of Israel Jesus preached the same things, using dif-
ferent words on different occasions. Under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit each
evangelist would have chosen to report those things which he considered most
useful for the instruction of his immediate readers—Christians of Jewish origin in
the case of Matthew, Gentile converts in the case of Luke. There is no reason
why one evangelist should not have selected certain items and another different
ones, depending on his readership, or why one should not have laid special
stress on some subjects and shortened or omitted accounts of others.
In this present discourse, we might distinguish three parts—the Beatitudes and
the curses (6:20-26); love of one’s enemies (6:27-38); and teaching on upright-
ness of heart (6:39-49).
Some Christians may find it difficult to grasp the need of practising the moral
teaching of the Gospel so radically, in particular Christ’s teaching in the Sermon
on the Mount. Jesus is very demanding in what He says, but He is saying it to
everyone, and not just to His Apostles or to those disciples who followed Him
closely. We are told expressly that “when Jesus finished these sayings, the
crowds were astonished at His teaching” (Matthew 7:28). It is quite clear that
the Master calls everyone to holiness, making no distinction of state-in-life, race
or personal circumstances. This teaching on the universal call to holiness was
a central point of the teaching of (Blessed) Monsignor Escriva de Balaguer. The
Second Vatican Council expressed the same teaching with the full weight of its
authority: everyone is called to Christian holiness; consider, for example, just
one reference it makes, in “Lumen Gentium”, 11: “Strengthened by so many and
such great means of salvation, all the faithful, whatever their condition or state—
though each in his or her own way—are called by the Lord to that perfection of
sanctity by which the Father Himself is perfect.”
In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus is not proposing an unattainable ideal, useful
though that might be to make us feel humble in the light of our inability to reach
it. No. Christian teaching in this regard is quite clear: what Christ commands, He
commands in order to have us do what He says. Along with His commandment
comes grace to enable us to fulfill it. Therefore, every Christian is capable of
practising the moral teaching of Christ and of attaining the full height of his calling
—holiness—not by his own efforts alone but by means of the grace which Christ
has won for us, and with the abiding help of the means of sanctification which He
left to His Church. “If anyone plead human weakness to excuse Himself for not
loving God, it should be explained that He who demands our love pours into our
hearts by the Holy Spirit the fervor of His love, and this good Spirit our Heavenly
Father gives to those that ask Him. With reason, therefore, did St. Augustine
pray: `Give Me what Thou command, and command what You please.’ As, then,
God is ever ready to help us, especially since the death of Christ our Lord, by
which the prince of this world was cast out, there is no reason why anyone should
be disheartened by the difficulty of the undertaking. To him who loves, nothing is
difficult” (”St. Pius V Catechism”, III, 1, 7).
20-26. The eight Beatitudes which St. Matthew gives (5:3-12) are summed up in
four by St. Luke, but with four opposite curses. We can say, with St. Ambrose,
that Matthew’s eight are included in Luke’s four (cf. “Expositio Evangelii Sec. Lu-
cam, in loc.”). In St. Luke they are in some cases stated in a more incisive, more
direct form than in the First Gospel, where they are given with more explanation:
for example, the first beatitude says simply “Blessed are you poor”, whereas in
Matthew we read, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, which contains a brief expla-
nation of the virtue of poverty.
20. “The ordinary Christian has to reconcile two aspects of this life that can at
first seem contradictory. There is on the one hand “true poverty”, which is obvious
and tangible and made up of definite things. This poverty should be an expression
of faith in God and a sign that the heart is not satisfied with created things and
aspires to the Creator; that it wants to be filled with love of God so as to be able
to give this same love to everyone. On the other hand, an ordinary Christian is
and wants to be “one more among his fellow men”, sharing their way of life, their
joys and happiness; working with them, loving the world and all the good things
that exist in it; using all created things to solve the problems of human life and
to establish a spiritual and material environment which will foster personal and
social development [...].
“To my way of thinking the best examples of poverty are those mothers and
fathers of large and poor families who spend their lives for their children and who
with their effort and constancy—often without complaining of their needs—bring up
their family, creating a cheerful home in which everyone learns to love, to serve
and to work” (St. J. Escriva, “Conversations”, 110f).
24-26. Our Lord here condemns four things: avarice and attachment to the things
of the world; excessive care of the body, gluttony; empty-headed joy and general
self-indulgence; flattery, and disordered desire for human glory—four very common
vices which a Christian needs to be on guard against.
24. In the same kind of way as in verse 20, which refers to the poor in the sense
of those who love poverty, seeking to please God better, so in this verse the “rich”
are to be understood as those who strive to accumulate possessions heedless of
whether or not they are doing so lawfully, and who seek their happiness in those
possessions, as if they were their ultimate goal. But people who inherit wealth
or acquire it through honest work can be really poor provided they are detached
from these things and are led by that detachment to use them to help others, as
God inspires them. We can find in Sacred Scriptures a number of people to
whom the beatitude of the poor can be applied although they possessed consi-
derable wealth—Abraham, Isaac, Moses, David, Job, for example.
As early as St. Augustine’s time there were people who failed to understand po-
verty and riches properly: they reasoned as follows: The Kingdom of Heaven be-
longs to the poor, the Lazaruses of this world, the hungry; all the rich are bad,
like this rich man here. This sort of thinking led St. Augustine to explain the
deep meaning of wealth and poverty according to the spirit of the Gospel: “Listen,
poor man, to my comments on your words. When you refer to yourself as Laza-
rus, that holy man covered with wounds, I am afraid your pride makes you de-
scribe yourself incorrectly. Do not despise rich men who are merciful, who are
humble: or, to put it briefly, do not despise poor rich men. Oh, poor man, be poor
yourself; poor, that is, humble [...]. Listen to me, then. Be truly poor, be devout,
be humble; if you glory in your ragged and ulcerous poverty, if you glory in like-
ning yourself to that beggar lying outside the rich man’s house, then you are only
noticing his poverty, and nothing else. What should I notice you ask? Read the
Scriptures and you will understand what I mean. Lazarus was poor, but he to
whose bosom he was brought was rich. `It came to pass, it is written, that the
poor man died and he was brought by the angels to Abraham’s bosom.’ To where?
To Abraham’s bosom, or let us say, to that mysterious place where Abraham was
resting. Read [...] and remember that Abraham was a very wealthy man when he
was on earth: he had abundance of money, a large family, flocks, land; yet that
rich man was poor, because he was humble. `Abraham believed God and he was
reckoned righteous.’ [...] He was faithful, he did good, received the commandment
to offer his son in sacrifice, and he did not refuse to offer what he had received to
Him from whom he had received it. He was approved in God’s sight and set before
us as an example of faith” (”Sermon”, 14).
To sum up: poverty does not consist in something purely external, in having or not
having material goods, but in something that goes far deeper, affecting a person’s
heart and soul; it consists in having a humble attitude to God, in being devout, in
having total faith. If a Christian has these virtues and also has an abundance of
material possessions, he should be detached from his wealth and act charitably
towards others and thus be pleasing to God. On the other hand, if someone is
not well-off he is not justified in God’s sight on that account, if he fails to strive to
acquire those virtues in which true poverty consists.
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Source: “The Navarre Bible: Text and Commentaries”. Biblical text from the
Revised Standard Version and New Vulgate. Commentaries by members of
the Faculty of Theology, University of Navarre, Spain.
Published by Four Courts Press, Kill Lane, Blackrock, Co. Dublin, Ireland, and
by Scepter Publishers in the United States.